"There are countless horrible things happening all over the world and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible." -Auberon Waugh

6 comments:

I'm on Social Security now, as is Mr. H (back in 1984, the government (Civil Service, that is) tied part of their retirement plan with Social Security). This means that Mr. H and I both are partially dependent on Social Security (since he squandered my two substantial cashed-in retirements from a glass manufacturing company and a mediocre midwestern university on things like a down payment on a house and paying off our bills before retirement). There are other sources, of course, but President I Won has pretty much trashed most of the investments.

Now, I paid into Social Security for thirty plus years, and nobody asked me if I wanted to. Yes, I know I will draw more out than I paid in (maybe, considering my physical circumstances). But, AGAIN, nobody asked me if I wanted to be part of this system, and certainly nobody warned either one of us that our pension plans were subject to looting by Congressthieves... for the public good, we're to understand.

Should Social Security be privatized and phased out? Most certainly, I have no problem with that. My grandkids will be better off. All I want is to live to the end of my days without spending them in a cardboard box under an overpass, which our current president seems to think is a fair "spreading the wealth around".

Actually unless Social Security is reformed the current recipients are much more likely to end up with that cardboard box than otherwise. When the crash from irresponsible government spending and borrowing comes it will mean the inability of the Feds to continue funding Social Security along with virtually everything else.

Of course the time for reform was 25 years ago, when Reagan first brought it up. Democrats demagogued the issue so Reagan shrugged and concentrated on more immediately urgent things, like winning the Cold War.

One of the problems with Obama's huge borrowing is that, as I believe, much borrowing will be needed to finance the reform of Social Security without crashing it. This borrowing will no longer be possible. It's been spent on useless economic stimulus and other new programs Obama and his pals in Congress have established (for the moment).

The danger to Social Security was clearly visible 30 years ago. I saw it then. Nothing has been done because the Democrats did not want to do anything to save Social Security. Thank them for the upcoming disaster.

Michael: Excellent points. And I think we voters have to pick up a share of the blame. As you say, it's been clear for thirty years (at least) that social security was nothing but a ponzi scheme. And what did we do? We kept electing politicians - right, center and left - who dodged the issue. And we knew they were dodging the issue. Elected officials weren't the only ones with their heads in the sand.

Reform might still have been possible at some point in the last couple of decades, but you're right: we would need to borrow to cover the funding gap. That may well be impossible now.